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Today when a Linux user goes shopping, they have many options and Dell is at the top. Dell has earned a good reputation within the Linux community for Project Sputnik that works on high-end Linux powered machines.
In late 2011, George was part of a team at Dell that was trying to figure out how Dell could better serve web companies. While Dell was already a major player supplying really big customers with custom servers, this group was looking to expand further to web companies of all sizes - from small garage start-ups to the Amazons, the Googles.
“We had brought in an analyst to give us some ideas, and one of the comments he made was that there was no major OEM building a fully-supported Linux laptop that came complete with drivers and provided a great out of the box experience,” said George. The advisor said if Dell offered a Linux laptop that "just worked" it would definitely generate interest from the developer community.
George looked at the idea and while he saw it as a great opportunity, he thought that it would never fly at Dell given the massive scale and volume that Dell’s client systems group operated at. “A strategic project like this targeted at a constituency that we hadn't focused on in the past would be tough,” said George. He put the idea on the shelf, filing it under the heading "a great but unrealistic idea."
Three months later, George learned about an internal innovation fund at Dell and saw a possibility to bring the idea of a developer laptop to life. He pitched the idea of "Project Sputnik" to the committee saying he wanted to put together a high-end Linux-based developer laptop. The idea he explained would be to take an open source approach and solicit input directly from the community to see what they wanted in a developer laptop. He planned to execute his plan in the open via blogs, forums and other social media.
While Dell had been offering Ubuntu since the late '90s, it had been on lower-priced systems. With Sputnik, the idea was to address a large audience who was looking for a premium system. The idea that someone would be willing to lay out the...